Sky Hopinka is a Native American visual artist, filmmaker, and member of the Ho-Chunk Nation who has developed new forms of cinema from the perspectives of Indigenous people. He is a MacArthur Fellow for his work offering new strategies of representation for expressing Indigenous worldviews. His work Kunįkága Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkága Remembers the Welcome Song will be on display in the Media Space Gallery from February 13 – March 31.
Jill Magid – Thursday, April 20th at Noon
Jill Magid explores emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions between individuals and institutions. She created the work Tender, evoking the connection between the human body and the body politic through the circulation of 120,000 newly minted 2020 edge-engraved pennies as a nearly invisible public artwork.
Stephanie Carpenter, Kinship: Belonging, 2019, Letterpress print from wood type
Stephanie Carpenter: Cultivating Community
Baer Gallery
January 23 -February 16
Coffee and Pastry Reception: Tuesday, February 7, 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Stephanie Carpenter examines the way we create unique communities. She explores modularity and the use of language related to how we are connected. She earned an MFA from Indiana University and her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally in Australia, Brazil, India, Italy and Japan.
Object Matters
Godschalx Gallery
January 23 -February 16
Explorations in clay, wood, and found objects by students in Art 224, Introduction to Sculpture.
Speculative Futures: Visions from Caregiving Printmakers
Baer Gallery
February 27 -March 28
Exhibition events:
March 23, 10 a.m. Bush Art Center: Panel discussion in BAC 130 with artists Katie Ries and Carrie Scanga, and labor historian Jessica Wilkerson. Panel followed by a reception in the gallery.
Speculative Futures is a portfolio of prints that imagine the future of caregiving. All of the participating artists are caregiving printmakers. The portfolio includes an essay by labor historian Jessica Wilkerson.
Design Localitas
Godschalx Gallery
February 27 -March 28
Featuring designs by the St. Norbert College Student Design Center.
2023 Senior Art Exhibition
Bush Art Center
April 11- May 4
Reception: Friday, April 21, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
The Senior Art Exhibition is the capstone experience for all St. Norbert College art majors.
The annual juried exhibition of work by current St. Norbert College students is on display! The juried show is open to all current students. This year’s jurors are David Graham and Terri Warpinski, professional artists and curators of NEWArtSpace, a gallery and studio space in downtown De Pere.
This year’s award winners with the jurors. From left to right: David Graham, Sydney Suchy, Logan Elkin, Catherine Nelson, Emma Fry, Emily Friday, Jackson Venski, Terri Warpinski.
This year’s winners were selected based on the quality of the entire body of work featured in the show, rather than a specific piece. Congratulations to all!
According to exhibition curator Brandon Bauer, “this exhibition brings together works by Aram Han Sifuentes that focus on democracy, citizenship, and political participation. The works in this exhibition manifest the notion of democracy as a contested space in which one can gain a political voice through citizenship, protest, or giving voice to those excluded politically.” It includes handmade protest banners, an Official Unofficial Voting Station, and a banner lending library.
A central feature of the exhibition is a wall of handmade protest banners. Sifuentes hosts workshops to teach sewing skills and banner-making techniques, passing on a traditional, intergenerational skills while drawing communities into conversation about protest and demonstration. Some banners were created by Sifuentes or during previous lending libraries, but a collection of banners made by campus community members are available to be checked out. Next to the poster is an instructional video on how to create a fabric banner with felt letters. A banner making workshop, with instruction by Moki Tantoco, will be taking place at noon on Thursday, October 20 at noon in the Mulva Library.
The St Norbert Community’s Protest Banner Lending Library
The Official Unofficial Voting Station is a symbolic voting station open to all. In addition to creating opportunities for anyone to cast a vote, stations bring together communities for conversation, protest, and celebration. Sifuentes, as a noncitizen immigrant, created the program in response to her inability to vote. The first iteration, prior to the 2016 election, included 25 collaborative activations of the station through performances and installations. The project was reiterated during the 2020 elections, with 50 voting station kits sent across the nation. A voting station is housed online, along with a developing archive of responses and vote tallies.
At the Bush Art Center’s Official Unofficial Voting Station, gallery visitors can fill out a freeform kind of ballot, sharing the reasons that they vote, as well as listing local, national, and global issues they’d like to vote on. The Official Unofficial Voting Station, a station for all people and for all issues, creates conversation around who can vote, and what issues visitors most want brought to the ballot. The anonymous ballot responses will be recorded and archived.
Ballots, a ballot box, and stickers, as well as voting rights informational handouts.
The exhibition will be on display between October 3 and October 27, with a reception from 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m., on Thursday, Oct. 20.
A Call to Halt is an installation and critical timeline of the Euromissiles Crisis, and the nuclear abolition movement in the United States from 1977-1987. The installation includes a reenactment of the 1982 Nuclear Freeze Referenda, in which Wisconsin was the first in the nation to put international nuclear disarmament policy to a popular vote.
Th exhibit includes a timeline of important events during the crisis as a series of archival images and captions superimposed with stenciled spray paint. Cultural, political and activist events are referenced, telling a story of collective public outcry and the power of ordinary people.
Visitors can use provided ballots and reenact Wisconsin’s nuclear disarmament referendum. The reenactment is both a reminder of the power of democracy and an opportunity for viewers to become active participants.
A Call to Halt will be on display from September 26 to October 27 in the Permanent Collection Gallery.
Through a broad, tactile mixture of textiles, printmaking, painting, and sculpture, An Advocate for an Imposter explores the nuanced relationship between imitation and authenticity. Beiswenger’s embroidery, sculpture, and weavings comprise an expansive, kind, and thoughtful conversation.
The central feature of An Advocate for an Imposter is a formal armchair upholstered in AstroTurf, flanked by two log end tables and resting on a large rug. On one side is a bowl of acorns. The arrangement creates interesting conversation about the distinction between “imposter” and “genuine.”
The AstroTurf upholstery is a particularly entertaining juxtaposition. AstroTurf is definitely an imposter, oversaturated plastic pretending to be a perfect, living yard. As upholstery, it’s doubly false–fake grass pretending to be an appropriate fabric for a seat (but actually a prickly, unpleasant surprise). The natural end tables, however, complicate the situation. Raw, unfinished wood–bare nature–is inserted into this indoor, almost domestic scene, yet the AstroTurf upholstery attempts to imitate the vibrance of living plants outdoors. Which belongs where? Who is really the imposter?
The rug below the chair has been printed with scrabble-worthy words that would pose a challenge for even the most experienced elementary school spelling bee champion. The nest of words is beautiful but overwhelming. It can be easy to feel like an imposter, standing in a space covered in terms you are ashamed you don’t know.
The wall facing the gallery entrance is dedicated to a life-sized skeleton, layers of patterned fabric exactingly embroidered with tight, floral embellishments. Next to it is pinned a small, three-inch square portrait. The contrasts between the two–in size, media, style, and presentation–are stark. The portrait, in its intimately small scale and open, unguarded expression, offers a deeply genuine moment of connection, while the skeleton is a much more precisely arranged look inside a person (literally). Both are undeniably appealing, but deeply different.
A series of cloth panels juxtapose carefully embroidered forms with sketches, splotches, and smudges. The organic, unintentional flaws and the precisely realized diagrams both have an appealing integrity to them. Sketches, coffee stains, and wrinkles–the fingerprints of an imperfect reality–honor the time, effort, and person beside the ideals of their work.
An Advocate for an Imposter will be on display in the Godschalx Gallery through October 20.
As fall semester begins, take a moment to reflect on Summer’s End, an exhibition of achingly beautiful work by Rafael Francisco Salas. The exhibition primarily features oil paintings of indistinct rural landscapes and a county fair in “a metaphorical change of season. It is an oblique atmospheric meditation on political and social divides. The landscape emerges as an emotional rather than a literal one. The county fair at summer’s end is a place of reckoning, full of innocence, and innocence lost.”
From left to right: County Fair #3 (Calf), County Fair #1 (Princess), County Fair #2 (Shovel), 2021. Oil on canvas.
Salas’ paintings feature luminous backgrounds, their inner glow contrasting with a persistent shadow that creeps in at the corners of the canvases. He doesn’t shy away from saturated, earthy colors, but, paired with muted grays, the overall effect is a sense of disillusioned nostalgia.
2021 Landscape, 2021. Oil on canvas.
Summer’s End layers the hopefulness of the ideal, the clarity of recollection, and the crumbling of memory. Sharply rendered figures and sparkling fireworks are placed atop hazy rural landscapes, bleeding into but distant from their surroundings. Focal points dissociate into abstract strokes of jeweled color, and backgrounds fade into the feeling of a landscape, rather than a physical location.
In addition to large oil paintings, Summer’s End includes a collection of process sketches. This body of delicate, thoughtful works contextualize the ideas that culminated in each painting. It’s interesting to see how a change in medium affects the perception of each subject, with small studies in ink, acrylic, and collaged paper a quietly different treatment than the large oil paintings.
Process work.
Salas is a professor of art at Ripon College, where he also serves as chair of the department of Art and Art History, and has also been appointed to the Wisconsin Arts Board. His work has been displayed in New York City, San Diego, and Boston. He’s also shown work extensively in the Midwest, including in the Neville Public Museum, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and the Frank Juarez Gallery. His work is represented by Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee. Salas has also worked as an arts writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Newcity Art Chicago, The Isthmus Magazine and Urban Milwaukee.
Rockets #1 and Rockets #2, 2022. Oil on canvas.
Summer’s End opened on August 29 and can be viewed in the Baer Gallery through September 22. A reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, September 8. The gallery is open to the campus and the community.
Baer Gallery: October 3 – October 27, 2022 Exhibition Reception – October 20
This exhibition brings together works by Aram Han Sifuentes that focus on democracy, citizenship, and political participation. The works in this exhibition manifest the notion of democracy as a contested space in which one can gain a political voice through citizenship, protest, or giving voice to those excluded politically. Sifuentes’s work investigates identity politics, immigration, citizenship and belonging, dissent and protest, and racial politics in the United States today.
A Call To Halt by Brandon Bauer
Permanent Collection Gallery: September 26 – October 27, 2022
A Call To Halt is an installation and critical timeline of the Euromissiles Crisis, and the nuclear abolition movement in the United States from 1977-1987. The installation includes a reenactment of the 1982 Nuclear Freeze Referenda, in which Wisconsin was the first in the nation to put international nuclear disarmament policy to a popular vote.
Angry Sandwich People or in Praise of Dialectics by Chto Delat?
Media Space Gallery: August 29 – October 27, 2022
In this piece, the Russian art collective Chto Delat? (What is to be done?) imagines protest as a form of theatrical happening in urban space by bringing to life Bertolt Brecht’s poem “In Praise of Dialectics”. The action was carried out in close collaboration with two local activist groups, Worker’s Democracy and The Pyotr Alexeev Resistance Movement at Stachek Square, an important historic site where in 1905 striking workers marched on the Winter Palace.
Art & Society Lectures and Events
September 6 – Aram Han Sifuentes Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. This lecture is associated with her exhibition in the Bush Art Center Galleries.
September 13 – Dmitry Vilensky Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Dmitry Vilensky is an artist, writer, and founding member of the Russian art collective Chto Delat? (What is to be done?), a platform initiated in 2003 by a collective of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.
September 22 – U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Founded in 2013 The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) is a “people-powered department” (not a federal agency) committed to supporting individuals and organizations in mobilizing creativity in the service of justice.
September 28 – Center for Artistic Activism lecture (BAC 130) 1:10 – 2:10 pm
The Center for Artistic Activism has helped to build, sustain, and develop the field of artistic activism since its inception in 2009 through innovative research and by providing free resources and training to artists and organizations around the world.
October 20 – Get Out The Vote Banner Making Workshopwith Moki Tantoco @ Noon in the Mulva Library First Floor Flex Space
This banner-making workshop is in association with the Aram Han Sifuentes Exhibition in the Bush Art Center Galleries. Moki Tantoco has collaborated with Aram Han Sifuentes and will lead this banner making workshop. Moki is an arts administrator, educator, and artist based in Illinois who encourages exploring socially engaged art practices through writing, performance, and installation.
November 15 – Oliver Ressler Zoom Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Oliver Ressler is an artist who lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He produces theme-specific exhibitions, projects in the public space, and videos on issues such as democracy, capitalism, and social alternatives to our existing political realities. His work blurs the boundaries between art and activism.
November 17 – Jonas Staal Zoom Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Jonas Staal is a Dutch visual artist. His work deals with the relationship between art, democracy, and propaganda.
Special Thanks to The Norman Miller Center for Peace, Justice, & Public Understanding, The Sturzl Center for Community Service and Learning, The Honors Program, The Office of Student Inclusion and Belonging, The Mulva Library, the Bush Art Center Galleries, and the Art Department for support of this programming.
“Summer’s End” imagines a metaphorical change of season. It is an oblique, atmospheric meditation on political and social divides. The landscape emerges as an emotional place rather than a literal one. The county fair at summer’s end is a place of reckoning, full of innocence, and innocence lost.
A mixed media project by April Beiswenger, Associate Professor of Theatre at St. Norbert College.
Aram Han Sifuentes: Let Us Vote!
Baer Gallery, October 3 – Oct. 27
Exhibition events: Banner Making: Noon to 2:00 pm, Thursday, October 20 (location tbd) Reception: Bush Art Center, 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 20
Let Us Vote features the work of Aram Han Sifuentes and highlights participation and disenfranchisement in the political process. This exhibition is curated by Brandon Bauer, Associate Professor of Art.
2022-23 Juried Student Art Exhibition
Baer Gallery, November 7- Dec. 2, 2022, Reception: Thursday, November 10, 4:30-6:30 p.m.
An annual juried exhibition of work by current St. Norbert College students.
Senior Art Exhibition: Rachel Stover
Godschalx Gallery, November 7- Dec. 2, 2022, Reception: Thursday, November 10, 4:30-6:30 p.m.
The Senior Art Exhibition is the capstone experience for all St. Norbert College art majors.
